North Carolina Runaway Slave Ads. 1730-1865
The North Carolina Runaway Slave Advertisements project provides online access to all known runaway slave advertisements (more than 2300 items) published in North Carolina newspapers from 1751 to 1840. These brief ads provide a glimpse into the social, economic, and cultural world of the American slave system and the specific experience within North Carolina. Working from microfilmed copies of these rare publications, the project team scanned the ads to provide digital images, create full-text transcripts and descriptive metadata, and develop a searchable database. The NCRSA website includes digital scans of the ads, contextual essays to address their historical research value, full text transcripts, an annotated bibliography to aid researchers, and a searchable database.
The project is now in a second phase that aims to locate. digitize, and transcribe all ads published between 1840 and 1865.
People Not Property: Slave Deeds of North Carolina
he People Not Property project is a collaborative endeavor between the UNCG University Libraries, North Carolina Division of Archives and Records, and North Carolina Registers of Deeds among others. Working as an addition to and evolution of the Digital Library on American Slavery, the project is leading towards a unique, centralized database of bills of sales indexing the names of enslaved people from across North Carolina.
When complete, People Not Property – Slave Deeds of North Carolina will include robust metadata, high resolution images, and full-text searchable transcripts. We hope to open the project to states beyond North Carolina, creating a central location for accessing and researching slave deeds from across the Southern United States.
This project is made possible through funding from the National Archives.
UNCG Digital Collections Content Migration
In 2019-2020, we will be making big changes to the UNCG Digital Collections as we move our collections from the CONTENTdm platform to a new content management system and create a brand new user experience. Our hope is that the new website will make it easier for users to find information, and will provide better search and viewing options for our collections. The look and feel will be simplified and should be much more accessible on mobile devices. Our collections will also continue to be discoverable through WorldCat and the Digital Public Library of America.
This is a massive undertaking that will involve the migration of more than 50,00 objects, consisting of over 700,000 digital files. In the process, we will also be cleaning up and adjusting the descriptive metadata for the items, moving to the MODS metadata schema, which will–we hope–add to the user experience.